Performance appraisals serve many purposes. They are an opportunity to improve the entire organization by capitalizing on an employee’s strengths and focusing effort on areas that need improvement. They serve as a mechanism for supervisors to remind employees of job expectations and performance standards, and to measure how the employee is doing against those standards. Performance reviews can also be a roadmap for planning an employee’s professional development. They may even help employees get paid what they’re worth.

Yet as useful as they are, performance reviews are easy to ignore and leave undone. We don’t have time to evaluate our work because we’re too busy doing it. This is where ProForma for JIRA Service Desk can help.

Advantages of Using ProForma and Jira Service Desk for Performance Reviews

JSD offers several advantages over using traditional paper-based or MS Word forms:

Efficiency – Jira offers an easy, streamlined way to keep performance appraisals on track. Queues, issue tracking and approvals make it easy to efficiently pass the information from the supervisor, to HR to the employee and back to HR. Anyone involved in the issue can check its status at any time and the request’s position in the queue helps to ensure that it doesn’t get passed over just because there are other tasks that seem more urgent (or more pleasant).

The forms you need – One size does not fit all. The ProForma template library includes a variety of performance management forms for you to select from. Whether you’re collecting 360 degree feedback or doing a formal annual appraisal, you’ll find the form you need.

Confidentiality – Obviously, performance reviews need to be kept confidential. ProForma’s integration with HelloSign (available for Jira Cloud) means that even when a signature is required, there’s no longer any risk of an employee’s review being seen by one of his or her co-workers as it lays in the printer tray.

Monitoring – Performance appraisals need to be done. Doing them in JSD means your HR department can easily audit which appraisals have been done and which are outstanding. This helps keep everyone in compliance.

The system you know - There's no need to invest time and money in an HR software system just to be able to manages performance reviews. ProForma empowers you you to use a system you know and love (Jira) for any number of processes, including performance reviews.

Limitations

That being said, there are some limits to doing your performance reviews in Jira:

No grids – Jira does not support tables or grids. When you’re evaluating an employee across multiple factors (productivity, team work, communication, etc.) using the same evaluation criterion, a grid would seem to be the most natural, space-saving way to collect that information. However, this is a limitation in appearance only. You can still collect all of the same information via some creative formatting and since there’s no need to print, an inefficient use of space does not represent wasted paper.

Auto-populating from other forms – In a perfect world, the professional development goals that a supervisor and employee identified in the employee’s 2016 performance review would automatically populate the employee’s 2017 performance review form so the supervisor and employee could comment on the progress towards those goals. Sadly, this is not the case. You still have to type or use the old cut and paste routine.

Overall, advantages such as confidentiality and the ability to check the status at any moment outweigh the limitations. But the real reason you should use Jira for your performance reviews is because it helps to ensure that a job that needs to get done, gets done! If you’d like more information on how to use ProForma for JSD to conduct your performance appraisals, check out the video below.